The Loneliness

I awoke the next morning at 7:43 AM, much earlier than my habits in college had groomed me to awaken. For the week prior to this day, I had grown accustomed to hearing a shuffling from the master bedroom towards the bathroom and then the running of water from the large shower head. At this point, I rolled over - it was my grandmother, doing her morning routine before preparing coffee and staring wistfully out the large glass windows to the desolation of the barren winter snowscape that lay silently outside her warm home. The ice was too treacherous for any fishermen to dare venturing out onto it, no matter how good the fishing was likely to be, and the snow was too crisp and powderless, its moisture sapped by months on the frozen ground and exposed to the open winds, to be of any use to snowmobilers, who would be on the trails. I caught a glimpse of her on the first morning, when I had been started awake by her movements, foreign as they were to my ears. It nearly killed me with sorrow.
On this morning, I had awakened at this customary time and was alerted by the distinct lack of sound emanating from anywhere in the house but my deeply-breathing lungs. I shot from bed and flung the door wide, frantically looking into my grandmother's room to make sure that she was alive - and remembered, standing in the doorframe in my underwear, that she was not there because she was probably on a plane from Traverse City to Detroit and then somewhere in Italy. I do not know if this revelation was any better than if I had discovered her lying stupefied in her bed, so sour did it turn my spirits.
The sun was barely risen but I was at full noon. I could not be here alone all the time. I had friends, people I had known from college and before who could easily visit me, now that we were all in the lull between college and "real world" jobs and families. How appropriate was it to ask them over, though? Really, it was now my house, thus I could do what I pleased with it. At the same time, though, I felt a great tightening in my stomach, a worry that she would come home unannounced to find me with many friends and be upset. This was uncharacteristic of her, and I dismissed the thought, knowing it to be a nonsensical fear.